[spectre] ICC and for the media art center of 21C

[Andreas Broeckmann]

friends,

there has been an intensive exchange over the weekend and i think it 
might be interesting to mull over some of the points in detail. time 
is limited though, so i will try to respond only to things which i 
have stronger opinions about.

saschaB
(...)i fear that if we continue to elaborate on '(new) media culture' 
we are just hauling around a dead body. (...)
most of those qualities sound good to me, but leave out the 'digital'
in culture, it's just a common part by now, imho there is no need to
set it apart and deal with the computer-based/-run part of culture
much differently than with the rest, it's just too ubiquitous for
that. the borders run along other territories now.(...)

abroeck: i do and i don't agree; we have had long discussions here at 
transmediale about the former sub-title 'media art festival', for 
pretty much the same reasons that sascha points out; what we have 
decided to use now is 'festival for art and digital culture', on the 
one hand because we believe that the festival is neither 'about 
media' or 'about technology', but it is about 'art' and the cultural 
context within which a certain trend of art is evolving - we can that 
'digital culture', for want of a better word: it means that there is 
an extensive stratum of cultural practices (culture understood not in 
a high culture sense, but in a broad sense as forms of human 
production of meaning, alongside whatever somebody does ...) which 
are connected to digital technologies and the gamut of styles, ideas, 
possibilities they bring. i agree that this 'digital culture' is now 
so prevalent that it makes little sense to imagine it as a 
distinctive territory. yet, i believe that it is _useful_ to 
communicate what we are doing to a wider public with this term, which 
in a way only connotes that cultural practices today are influenced 
by a development spurred by digital apparatuses. for many people, 
this is not so clear, and transmediale is, hopefully, a place where 
people are inspired to think critically and imagine the possibilities 
that contemporary culture engenders. given the amount of ignorance 
about the cultural impact of digital technologies, i think there is a 
need to use this, strategically, heuristically. - maybe 'digital' 
here is a way of pointing out that things are changing ... - i know 
this is a crutch, and i fully agree that 'media', or even worse: 'new 
media', have become completely vacuous terms that - however, are 
still being used quite broadly and thus have currency, whether we 
agree intellectually, or not.

saschaB:
if the driving logic behind those institutions was in its core
technological, wouldn't it be an error to base future development on
technology (call it '(new) media' if you wish), again? wouldn't that
lead to confusing means and ends *again*? still, nearly everybody
seems to be so used to the paradigmatical fixation on 'media' that it
obstructs their clear vision.

abroeck: sascha, as i say, for me the point is that the technologies 
have a set of effects which are worth exploring, and which in fact 
are being explored by some artists; it does not mean that i try to 
push everything that is going on through this filter, but i think it 
is an important field of cultural production that deserves attention. 
as you suggest when talking about differentiation of different social 
roles: there is a pragmatic reason for approaching this area as 
'specific'. - i agree that it might very well be that ICC and ZKM 
were originally based on a paradigm of 'technological distinction' 
('the fact that an artist works with digital technologies makes him 
relevant for our centre'), rather than on a more flexible cultural 
paradigm that will shift with the nodes of cultural production. 
(excuse the vagueness)


ericK:
So here the question would be do we finally dissolve the category of
"art" and replace it with a broader cultural logic that looks at the
aesthetic, semiotic, social and political qualities of the kind of media
activity that is going on, or is there still a value in keeping such
disciplinary distinctions and professional identities in place?
Or, is the notion of art possibly counterproductive in dealing with the
wider issue of contemporary media cultures?

abroeck: for me, this is not a question; art practice does not become 
obsolete just because the means of cultural production change; art is 
an always vague concept that describes a transgressive, obstructive, 
rupturing cultural practice which breaks away from the expected, the 
normalised, and forces experiences that could not be had otherwise - 
because of this, 'art' is a highly subjective category which we will 
be able to argue about forever. for me it is kind of an 
_epistemological_ concept, and it remains useful to describe 
practices, events, _works_, that fall outside the realm of the 
useful, the normal, the pragmatic, which culture needs to affirm in 
order to create a common ground for social communication. - 
therefore, the notion of 'art' remains highly relevant as a _strange_ 
way of being in, and experiencing, the world.


abroeck: the point about the 'media art centre of the 21st century' 
and its 'place' is for me a quite pragmatic one - it is not at all a 
question of 'where it should be', because i firmly believe that this 
is mostly a local affair that needs to be developed and thought 
through on a local level - in each of the cities that have been 
mentioned, we can probably imagine a whole range of different places 
that would find their users, audiences, purposes.
what is a question for me is how 'art practice in digital culture' is 
developing (please, excuse the auto-reference), and how it is 
possible to change (or replace) existing institutions, so that they 
help to house, support, foster the artistic work that wants to be 
housed, supported, fostered. in my experience, these are often very 
practical questions: a studio space or a workshop for a limited 
period of time, a context where different artists with different 
fields of expertise can come together, collaborate, exchange ideas, 
present work in progress, and possibly also reach a wider, even 
international audience. (i like the notion of the 'incubator', or 
'flow heater/Durchlauferhitzer) - a lot of this cannot be done 
through the Net, a lot of it happens in real spaces, however 
disparate, distant and diverse they may be. - there is public funding 
for the arts, and what kinds of institutions should we develop with 
that funding so that they best serve artistic production today?

shulea:
I want to make a departure from TH's suggestion of festival
model (the top down and include all, the main and the fringe).
I am pondering a mode a la meshnetwork relay system.
In the set up of meshnetwork, let's consider water(air) being
the basic (human-machine) rights. <Sure, challenge me about who's
pumping the air.> Then, how this relay system can be set up -
which recycles the resources, thus made self-sustainable.

abroeck: what i think is interesting is that such a relay system is 
not tied to stable instituions - something that i thought, again for 
pragmatic reasons, when we did some of our european networking in the 
late 90s; such meshworks and relay systems are hybrid, they can 
combine machines, individuals, groups and institutions of all 
different shapes and sizes - and each of these connections can cause 
great difficulties when you enter into more complex communications 
between the nodes, given the huge differences in the resources and 
ideas that people have. which is why many of the more complex relay 
projects are managed by medium-size institutions that can work both 
ways, with more fluid segmented structures as well as with the 
docking stations at molar institutions. - however, i don't see 
projects that have a noteworthy life-span and that offer financial 
and organisational support to artists, which are not rooted locally 
and have the possibility to maintain some sort of stable structure 
and income. (which brings us back to the ICC where corporate interest 
leads to a withdrawal of exactly that income...)


mmmh, is this helpful? don't know...

-a